Saw a thread on the official forums where it looks like NA servers may be merged  down to 4. Set, Dagoth, Tyranny, Cimmeria. That can only mean good things for the players, but  some players feel like that wil be too few and think that three PvE and 3 PvP would be bettter.

the thread

forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php

4 is definitely too few.  Those 4 servers all have good populations and will probably be kept 'as is'.  The rest of the servers will probably be merged into 2-4 other servers.  Players have basically already 'merged' themselves anyway.  Funcom probably put the 'recommended' tag next to those servers just to prevent new players from chosing anything else and then have to merged later.

That thread is just someones assumption, it's an understandable assumption but is far from being fact. I think it would be a massive shame if they do as Azrile has just suggested though and leave these 4 alone. These 4 servers have acceptable populations but they are far from good. For the seige endgame to work well there needs to be far more powerful guilds than battlekeep spots otherwise there is little conflict.

I think the reason these 4 are recommended is so that when new people join the game they don't think WoW this place is a ghost town, this is no fun and quit. It's the right thing for funcom to have done.

Personally I'd go with 6 NA servers or if they are planning to give everyone a free trial in the near future I'd go with 8.

Depends what the servers can handle though because of isntanceing you can't really have too many people so they should have as few servers as possible without comprimising server performance on a weekend when pops are at their highest.

Lets try a different approach:

At Launch they said that servers are ready for 650.000 subscribers within 1st month they added quite few new servers so let "assume" for 800.000 players.

Atm Age of Conan have 49 servers in EU/US

800.0000 players / 49 servers   = 16.326 subscribers per server ( not concurrent players )
The amount of players per server would be something similar to WoW server.

In August they said 415.000 thats 8.000 per server.
The population in August was still decent on most or all servers.

Well lets assume Age of Conan have now 150.000 subscriber (they can have 200.000 or 50.000 just change numbers accordingly) and that to satisfy healthy population they need at least 8.000 subscribers per server ... they would need 18 / 19 servers.

If they have 8 PvP servers in NA they should be merged into 3 etc...

There gonna paint a pretty picture for the end of the year report to there stockholders and try to spin it so as to keep them giving money. Its bottom line time for all companys and Funcom is not doing to well.

Originally posted by AmazingAvery

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The fact is that Funcom has added the 'recommended' tag to those 4 servers.  Those are also the 4 servers that most people say has a decent population.  It's a good thing that Funcom did this as new players are more likely to have better gameplay on those servers... making assumptions about them as 'the' servers after the mergers is just guessing, but that's mostly what we do on these forums anyway :)

I don't think it's fair to compare LOTRO to AOC.   Lotro is a casual pve game that is focused mainly on questing (solo for the most part).     AOC is focused more on pvp, and group pvp at that.   The number of players 'needed' on an AOC server to make gameplay fun is much higher than a game like Lotro or WOW.  Lotro and WOW are far less likely to feel the need to merge servers because of this.

 Warhammer has it even worse than AOC since pvp is realm based.  Warhammer needs almost double as many players per server as AOC does to make it fun ( or else there is nobody to fight).

lol age of conan has pve no game is forcused on any thin it all about having fun on what you want to play want pvp go pvp severs want pve go on pve severs it has it all, its all about fun on how they want to play

4 is a good number to start with. Once FC gets everyone onto those 4 servers then Im sure they will reassess the situation a few weeks after the merge and if they need to bring on 1 or 2 more servers then they will. Once(if) the new servers are up and running then they will most likely open up free transfers to these servers.
FC screwed up the first time by launching too many servers for the amount of subscribers to AoC. IMO they will do the opposite and try to underguess the needed servers instead of overguessing.

They really shouldn't need to guess, they should have the numbers they need to make an informed decision.

Something like add up the primetime population on sunday night across all servers, decide how many people they want max per server, divide one by the other to get the number of servers. If they plan a big marketing/freetime/comeback trials in the next 3 months add an extra server or two, if not go with the first number.

I said earlier in the thread 6 but I'm thinking 5 is better, that would be 2000 people online primetime per server if they currently get 10000 people primetime on sunday night.

They have to guess because FC has no idea what effect the new WoW expansion will have on them. FC knows that they will be losing players when they go back to WoW but they dont know exactly how many.
10% ?
20% ?
More?
It is, and has always been, much easier to add servers than to take them some away.
I, personally, think that AoC has about 125K subscribers. I think that AoC will lose about 25K+ subscribers once Wrath of the Lich King launches.(BTW, I cant begin to tell you how much I hate WoW)
That will put around 100K subscribers between NA and EU servers. Even if the NA and EU subs were an even split(Im pretty sure that EU subs are actually more than NA) that would give NA about 50K in subs, putting each of the 4 servers around a max of 12.5K per server, which is pretty good. If my numbers are wrong and the actual sub rate is indeed lower then the 4 servers wont be as crowded but will still be really heavy. If I am low in my count and the amount of NA subs are quite high after the release of WotLK then FC can easily bring up an additional server to ease to workload of the original 4 servers.

Im thinking 8 would be enough for healthy populations, but then you also have to factor in all the people that will come back once servers are merged and most likely a new influx of players from all the good news about it that will probably occur after servers are merged(population I think is the only thing holding this game back right now). Im interested to see how they will handle the BK issue seeing as Im in a guild with a t3 BK myself.

Originally posted by AmazingAvery

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I doubt if AoC has half the subs that LoTRO does by now, probably closer to 1/4 if that. I hate to use XFire to compare two games but LoTRO had about 6500 logged hours yesterday and AoC dropped down to 2800. I bet a highjer percentage of  players in AoC use XFire than in LoTRO simply because LoTRO has a ingame voice chat while AoC does not.

Anyway Flourine was very positive about the game his post I thought. Look at it this way, If they merge and still have too many servers then they still have the same problem and have solved nothing. If they merge and later on more people decide to play then they can always add another. The way I see it right now AoC is still in a steady bleed mode, better to plan ahead, go with fewer servers and save themselves some money and give what players they have left  a better populated world which would help with the fun factor than try and save face and still have empty servers.

My own guess would be they have about 15 to 20% of the players left from launch numbers so I think 4 to 5 servers would be about right.